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Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Posted Dec 2, 2009 22:48 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package by nim-nim
Parent article: Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

And just to show how pointless Apple brags are
1. there are almost 20k binary packages in Fedora x86_64 development version alone (about 19500)
2. Add the i386, ppc, etc package numbers
3. Add Fedora 1 to 12 packages
4. Add updates

Suddenly 100k does not look such a high number

And that was one Linux distribution. I could have inflated the numbers even more by counting its predecessor (Red Hat Linux), all its derivatives (OLPC, RHEL, EPEL, CentOS, Moblin, etc)


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Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Posted Dec 3, 2009 12:03 UTC (Thu) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

Well, it may help to put that 100k number from November in context, that Apple was bragging about 85k apps in late September:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/09/28appstore.html

Thank you for looking up the Fedora package numbers. They are interesting, so let's play a bit with them. As we are comparing single, centralized distributions of upstream software here, I think it's more adequate to pick a single Fedora release - the one you provided numbers for.

As Fedora packages developer-oriented parts of an upstream separately, I'd assume that's around 10k upstream applications for the current distribution. For the sake of inflating Fedora's numbers, let's count libraries as applications, too.

For the sake of deflating Apple's numbers, let's apply the Pareto principle, and weed out 80% of the apps as trivial. That leaves 20k non-trivial apps in November, and 17k in late September.

Let's also assume that the Pareto principle does not apply to Fedora at all - everything that gets packaged into Fedora is a non-trivial labor of love, and so on.

Even with all that, Fedora is still quite a bit behind Apple's distribution in raw numbers. In particular, just the increase in non-trivial apps in Apple's distribution in the course of a couple of weeks is almost a third of all of all applications in Fedora.

I'd be very surprised if the growth of packages in Fedora is remotely close to that. So I think that maybe there is more then 'one true way' to implement 'industrialized', 'efficient' software distribution.

Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Posted Dec 3, 2009 12:56 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

You continue to be disingenuous

Apple counts *all* apps, for *all* its systems (itune, iphone, etc)

So it is not fair to remove older releases, Apple counts them too

It is not fair to count only Fedora but not OLPC, Centos, RHEL, etc Apple counts different lines of products too

And lastly, Apple does not have the aggressive culling processes of a distribution like Fedora. Fedora worries about mirror space, Apple worries about getting the highest number count possible in press releases.

Yet, even given all this, Apple does not manage to equal the Fedora ecosystem alone.

So your chosen example nicely disproves your point.

Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Posted Dec 4, 2009 15:37 UTC (Fri) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

"You continue to be disingenuous"

Well, thank you for your polite, respectful and informative words. You have eloquently convinced me, now I see that I was wrong all along.

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